


Silverthing

by theprecursors



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, More tags to be added, Scavenging and Survival, Zombies, brief descriptions of violence, loosely inspired by The Last of Us and The Walking Dead but not a crossover, the ham zombie au that no one asked for
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-11-14 03:29:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11199543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprecursors/pseuds/theprecursors
Summary: Two years ago, the United States fell into chaos. Bustling cities and towns dissolved into ruin, populated only by small safe areas cleared by the new, military governing force.Two months ago, they left the New York City Clear Zone.---a.k.a. the overly complicated, overly thought out hamilton zombie au that no one asked for





	1. nobody gonna save you now

**Author's Note:**

> what have i been doing with the week since moving and living without internet? replaying the last of us and writing this monstrosity -- 
> 
> in all serious, though, im excited for this fic & have the plot figured out ! because the chapters are so long, though, i wouldnt expect a very soon update (& i still have limited access to the internet and would be posting only when im able, for now ! )

**New York State  
August, 2 A.O. (After Outbreak)**

_“It’s been weeks, Hamilton,”_ Hercules’s voice carries through the hall, through the walls. Even kept low, it’s deep and full and John lies on his back, stares at the ceiling, and listens.

_“You think I don’t know that? Herc – ”_

_“We’re running out of food. We’re already out of water. We can’t stay here much longer – ”_

Alex says something else that John doesn’t catch. His tone is higher, his volume hissed in a loud whisper. John’s supposed to be sleeping, supposed to be getting rest; he’d stayed up all night and kept guard. He’d sat all night in an old lawn chair with his gun on his knee and knife in its holster at his hip, its buckle undone for ease of access. But he’d sat all night.

The garage door creaks and rumbles when it’s forced up. Instinct, muscle memory, John fumbles for his knife; his arms get caught up in the sheets and he backpedals on all fours. Stops only when Laf’s voice echoes against the concrete.

“It’s me. Calm down.”

“I was _sleeping_ ,” John says, indignant.

“You were not.”

John squints against the sun, watches Lafayette as he dumps his bag onto the floor and stretches to pull the garage door back down. They’ve been here for weeks. Taking turns keeping watch, taking turns venturing out into the abandoned town in search of food and water and supplies.

“I was trying to.”

Lafayette pulls the bag with him by one strap, sits down on the mattress with John. He and Alex had struggled to pull it down from one of the house’s bedrooms when they’d first cleared and secured it. It’s stripped of its covers and pillows save for the one sheet, but it’s a place to sleep and to sit and it fits three of them if they don’t mind pressing close. He shuffles through the bag and passes a candy bar to John.

“It’s crushed, and it might be melted,” Lafayette says it like an apology.

“Thanks, dude,” he says, pulling wrinkles out of the wrapper. The night before, or a few nights ago, he’d been whining about missing chocolate. Then, it had just been complaints. Easier to complain about something trivial, given their circumstances.

 _“Fuck’s sake, Ham – ”_ Herc’s voice carries again, this time louder, halfway to a shout, as Alexander storms into the garage from the house. He’s fuming, eyes bright and angry and lined with heavy dark circles and pinched eyebrows.

“Lafayette – did you find anything?” Alexander sounds dangerously calm. He stands with his arms crossed, but only momentarily. Soon, he’s pulling the bag away from Laf’s feet and roots through it. He pulls out a few bags and containers and cans of food, but there’s no water. He pulls out a crushed first-aid kid, packages of gauze and a pressure bandage, but there’s no water.

Hercules stands in the door, leans on its frame, watches as Alexander examines each package.

“Ham, we’ve picked this town clean. We can’t stay here.”

Lafayette gives John a sidelong glance. They watch Alexander as he meticulously organizes the new supplies and returns them to the bag with care.

“We have food. We should stay.”

“Alexander – ”

“Where are we going to _go,_ Hercules?” Alexander finally snaps and shouts, turns his whole body to look Herc down. “What if every town is just like this one? Huh? What then! We have a place to stay, here. We have a place to stay, at least.” His tone loses its anger, its conviction, and John watches Alexander’s shoulders slump as he deflates.

They’re all tired. Sleeping takes last place – it falls behind shelter, safety, food, water, in the hierarchy of survival. John sighs as he leans back to lie down again. His eyes have a permanent, tired, dryness and irritation to them. Now, though, having gone so long without sleep has allowed that feeling to spread across his head. Tired fog.

He should sleep, if he wants to be able to think straight and quick enough.

He waits for Hercules to respond and he doesn’t, really.

“Sure. Okay,” he concedes, gives Alex this one. “Just. Let’s not get too comfortable.”

Alexander mutters about something before he stands, passes by Hercules. John can hear his faint footsteps going up the stairs.

“Did you get any sleep, Laurens?” Hercules asks. His voice is gentle, its earlier sharpness lost, and John shakes his head.

“I tried.”

“Try harder. I’ll be in the house.”

The door closes behind him. Hercules has taken to keeping their arsenal in as perfect working order as they can manage with secondhand, salvaged weapons. They have one gun – _emergencies, only,_ they’d agreed – and a nearly nonexistent supply of bullets. Most of what they have are close-combat and high-risk: John’s knife, a crowbar that Alex had found, an aluminum bat they keep in the garage. The first choice is always don’t get spotted, don’t get found. The second is run, hide, get gone and find the others later.

“Did you see anything, out there?” John asks Lafayette as he turns onto his side.

“No, nothing.”

“They come out more at night,” he sighs.

Laf makes a noise of agreement as he pushes the bag away with his foot. Sheds off his boots and stretches his legs out in front of him.

“Why aren’t you sleeping, John?”

“Can’t.”

Lafayette smells like musk and heat. His hair is pulled back, kept away from his face and off his neck, and his skin is still shiny with sweat. As they’ve passed through the peak of summer, the days have been long and blistering. The house is stuffy, its air heavy with humidity and heat, and the garage only offers a slightly cooler solace. The sun has no windows to shine through, and the air can’t seep through the concrete.

John shifts, pushes the sheet off, and sits up, hugs his knees to his chest. His shirt stretches across his shoulders and has holes in the front, in the sleeves. The front has dried blood clung to it. He picks dirt out from under his fingernails and pushes his cuticles back with his thumbnail.

“You should sleep,” Lafayette tells him.

He only says, “I can’t,” again, and digs his teeth into his lip.

“Try. You need rest.”

“I have been trying,” he spits, annoyance bleeding into his words. “Do you think I’m staying up on purpose? I’m exhausted, I’ve been trying to sleep since Ham woke up, it’s been hours, and – ”

“I get it. I understand.” Lafayette cuts him off, no change in his tone. John sighs again, this time heavy, shaky. “Do you want me to sit with you?”

He nods, says _mhm,_ and watches as Lafayette stands, watches as he lifts the bag and disappears with it into the house, and then come back with a book in hand. There’s little that wasn’t left behind by whoever had occupied this house – most of the food was taken with them, clothing, photos out of their frames. What was left is objectively unnecessary: books, movies for a television without electricity, cleaning supplies and a full medicine cabinet of expired products. They’d found the liquor cabinet – still stocked with spirits and wine, but it’s gone still untouched since they had taken up residence here.

Laf settles next to him again, sits with his back against the wall, tells him again to try and sleep. It’s easier, next to someone, not alone in the garage and not hearing Hercules and Alexander argue with their voices low. Still, it’s been weeks, months maybe, since John or any of them have slept fully and soundly. Even with concrete walls around them and someone keeping watch, that prickle of fear, of arousal, never dissipates fully, leaving their nights restless and somewhere half-between awake and asleep.

Rain, sudden and loud and torrential, is what brings him back, fully away from sleep. Lafayette is already up, his book left open on the mattress. John comes up behind him, follows him into the doorway. The sky has gone dark, grey and angry. Thunder booms above them, shakes the house, and lightning cracks in the distance.

They race each other out into the fenced-in yard.

These rainstorms are the closest they get to showers. In the cleared blocks of the martial law controlled city, they’d had limited access to running water, only provided by the generator-powered military buildings. Now it’s rain and rivers, standing water and streams. They strip down to underwear and scrub off sweat and dirt and grime with bare palms. They take turns letting a bucket half-fill with water and pour it through each other’s hair. John scrubs the blood out of his shirt under the leaking gutter. Hercules comes out eventually, joins them, but Alexander never does.

John leaves a trail of wet footprints inside. He wrings his hair and his clothes out in the kitchen sink and drapes them over one of the chairs to dry. The footprints lead around the kitchen’s island counter, then disappear at the base of the carpeted stairs. John calls for Alexander into the upstairs hall. With no reply, he searches – the bathroom first, from which he takes a towel to dry off with and tie around his waist, then each bedroom.

Alexander is in the bathtub of the en suite of what was the master bedroom. His hands are shaking. The bathroom smells heavy: mold and ammonia.

“Alex,” he says. Then louder. Then softer, when he approaches and when he gently touches Alex’s shoulder.

Alex flinches with his whole body, recoiling away from John’s touch and he says, stern despite the quiver in his voice, “ _Go away._ ”

There’s enough conviction for John to draw back. He goes away only long enough to return to one of the bedrooms. It had once belonged to a teenage boy, probably, and he and Alexander have been sharing the clothes that remain in the closet. He takes the pair of jeans that they had fought over. Gets dressed before going back for Alex.

“Scoot,” he tells him and pushes forward on his shoulder.

“No – John – go _away_ ,” he says again, less conviction, more waver.

John pushes him forward and sits behind him in the tub. It’s uncomfortable, but Alex doesn’t try and make him leave. They’re both quiet; the rain comes down and John works the tangles out of Alex’s hair and rubs his back through the great rumbles of thunder. Until it quiets, and until the rain calms into a drizzle, they’re silent.

He knows Alex’s story. Sort of.

“We haven’t had a storm like that since we left,” John muses. Alex acknowledges him with something between a grunt and a hum.

That storm had been so bad that it pushed their plans back by a day. The violence of the downpour had made their escape route too perilous. He and Alex had planned on absconding the night of, planned on sneaking through an unmanned exit and making a mad break through the uncleared part of the city. Not just that, but the rain had incapacitated Alexander in the way that it is now: shaky hands, tense shoulders, a flinch that lingers into a tight cower with every roll of thunder.

When John had inquired about the reaction, as they regrouped the next morning, the answer had been vague. Something about a hurricane, something about bad times before the outbreak. _The past is the past,_ Alexander had told him before refusing to answer any more of his questions.

They left that night, under the cover of darkness and by first the dying light of sun, then by the high moon.

Up until those eight weeks ago, they had been serving mandatory military time together. John had just barely missed the November cut off – with a late October birthday, he was of the youngest in their class and freshly eighteen upon being put into service.

As the summer drifts closer to autumn and he nears nineteen, John tries not to think about where he’d be if his birthday had fallen just days later. Probably not here, probably not pulling Alex’s hair back in a dusty bathtub, smelling like rain and letting his hair air dry and go frizzy in the humidity.

“Tell me when you’re good, darlin’.” He ties off Alex’s hair, then folds it into a bun.

Despite the storm’s ending, they stay there long enough for John to start to sweat. It beads along his hairline and at the nape of his neck and only makes him feel more uncomfortably hot. He’d learned quickly that Alex needs his time to calm down, that he shouldn’t talk unless Alex asks him to, that all he really needs is a gentle touch to help him work through it.

Alex doesn’t say “Okay, I’m good,” until his hands stop shaking. He uses John as a brace to step out of the tub and they make their way back downstairs together.

The kitchen table is littered with Hercules and Lafayette’s soaked clothes. On the counter, the bucket that John and Lafayette had used to rinse out their hair is full of water and joined by two others and a fleet of empty bottles.

“Our water problem is solved, for now,” Hercules says. He’s changed, too, and comes in to join them from the garage. He places another armload of bottles on the counter, and starts to fill them from the buckets. His gaze lingers before moving back to John and Alex. “We can stay here.” With a moment’s further consideration, he adds: “For now.”

“We have food, we have water, we have shelter,” Alex insists. “I don’t see why we need to constantly be moving as well. It only burns up our energy – we should stay here for as long as we can before – ”

“Did you not just hear what I said?”

“Jesus Christ,” John rolls his eyes. “Y’all can get into this again, leave me out of it,” he walks around Alex to get back to the garage.

Lafayette has taken up his book again, looks blissfully unaware of the brewing fight in the kitchen.

“They’re stupid,” he says it loud enough for them to hear, loud enough to get Laf’s attention. He’s humored. “They fought about this all morning, and – and there they go again,” John gestures behind him, back to the kitchen, and shakes his head.

“Hercules knows what he’s doing and Alexander is headstrong,” Lafayette says. Rests his chin in his palm, splays his fingers across the spine of the book to keep his place.

“What do you mean Herc knows what he’s doing?”

“This isn’t the first time that he’s lived outside of a clear zone for any amount of time. Nor is it mine. Alexander isn’t wrong, either. Maintaining a shelter for as long as we’re able is not a bad idea, however unsustainable it is.”

John says _oh_ , and sits down in the old lawn chair.

“The life outside of the clear zones is nomadic by nature,” Lafayette continues. “Following supplies or getting away from something – staying still often is not an option.”

John knows little about Lafayette past his involvement with the New York military, knows less about Hercules. He knows that Lafayette is older than both him and Alex, younger than Hercules. He’d been in the States on a student visa when the outbreak hit, and was old enough to be drafted into the service when martial law took over. His lack of citizenship didn’t matter.

Nothing, then, really mattered. John remembers it clearly enough to know that Lafayette has seen some shit – bad shit, the kind of shit that makes you want to hole yourself up and never come out. At the start of the outbreak, he, and Alex, had been in New York City – where, objectively, some of the worst conditions on the eastern coast were contained.

For John, there had been enough time for his family to evacuate. They’d moved inland, all stayed with his grandparents and slept on inflatable mattresses and cots on the floor. Before long, the outbreak had spread up from Florida through the south and down from New York, into the capital and into Virginia, before it took the Carolinas, too.

They moved back into the cleared sector of Charleston. John’s father had it arranged so he’d be trained for the military in a sort of bastardized ROTC program that involved less of the mechanics and politics of the armed forces and more applicable knowledge: gun handling, close-combat, triage and first aid. That training gave him an edge that his father had hoped would offer him in a safer placement, but instead sent John up the coast and into New York just weeks after his eighteenth birthday.

“I didn’t know,” John says, eventually. He looks over his shoulder, back towards the kitchen, where Hercules and Alexander’s voices continue to trade off, sounding more civil than they had earlier.

Alex had had a promising future in the military. John never told him, but he’d once overheard their party leader recommending him to a higher up for more responsibility. He had the kind of future that overlooked squadrons and allocation of supplies. Almost clerical, but important for the effort to return to society.

“Why did you go back to the city?”

Lafayette sighs. “It’s complicated.”

John gestures with both hands. “We’ve got nothing if not time.”

“I was initially sent out of the city on a field mission. Locate survivors, direct them to the clear zone,” it sounds akin to a search-and-rescue mission, though those ended long before John had entered the service. “We only moved between New York and Albany, but it took nearly a week each way.”

Lafayette goes on to explain that he had the inclination to believe that their truer purpose was to relay information between the New York and Albany clear zones, to maintain some form of communication past the spotty radio signals that were already in place. The locating of survivors and effort made to maintain or create their safety, was secondary. He goes on to explain that this is how he’d met Hercules initially – that he’d been found somewhere along the way, and had declined their first offer to take him to Albany. Later, when they were on the move back to New York, he had joined them.

Lafayette admits that he doesn’t know much of Hercules’s story, either. Not past their travel from where he’d joined them and back to the city. “He’s fairly secretive,” Lafayette tells John. “I know more about you and Alexander.”

“You had access to our files.”

He only shrugs. “I did. I read them. They are biased. Yours, for example, was more detailed on your disciplinary proceedings than anything else.”

“Serious? I only got in trouble, like, twice,” John grumbles. Frowns. Crosses his arms like a petulant child and Lafayette laughs at him.

“It may have also mentioned your promising leadership skills,” he adds, if only to placate John. “The proceedings were mentioned as a contingency. Your temper, John,” he tuts.

John rolls his eyes. “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

Lafayette raises both eyebrows at him. “Your disciplinary record stated that you had a physical altercation with one of your own while Alexander cheered you on.”

“That was totally justified,” he argues. “Lee’ll get himself killed one day, just you wait.”

Laf hums. “I don’t think we’ll find out,” he says.

“Right.” John quiets. Looks down at his hands. They’ve deserted their posts. John is unsure of how the process operates now. Given the circumstance, there’s an element of doubt that anyone would come after them, that anyone would keep enough record to try them should they return, or be found. Does loyalty come into play when there’s only fragments of something to be loyal to?

There’s little that holds any of the clear zones together. Within the zones themselves there’s a haphazard form of military government to serve and control tens and hundreds of people trying to make lives for themselves. Between zones, there’s little contact. It’s safe to assume that most major cities have been partially cleared – but there’s no guarantee.

The only guarantee, for now, and for where they’re at, is that they won’t be returning to New York.

“Why did you pick us? Why did you pick me? Why did you pick Alex?” John asks, looks back up at Lafayette. “Be honest, Laf,” he adds before he can respond.

“You seemed promising.” Lafayette looks him in the eye.

The answer is cryptic. Lafayette looks away from him shortly, goes back to his book like the conversation is over. John narrows his eyes.

“The fuck does that mean?”

Lafayette gives him no heed, no response.

“Dude, what the fuck does that mean. Promising for _what_.”

Moments like these make evident that there’s something that Lafayette – and likely Hercules – is keeping from them. He had initially approached John and Alex under the guise of comradery. John knows, now, that Lafayette had just returned from Albany, Hercules in tow, when they had first met. The new information sheds light on little; Lafayette hadn’t been especially detailed when he’d brought up the plan to desert.

He had told them that he had his reasons, and that they were welcome to join him, and hadn’t refrained from alluding to the possibility of New York’s coming collapse. _It’s not sustainable,_ he’d said. _Something is going to give and it will wreak havoc when it does._

The words, coming from someone with as much acclaim about them as Lafayette, were enough to convince John, and his conviction was enough to convince Alexander. His claim also didn’t come without evidence – with the time put between the beginning of the outbreak and the present, supplies were running short. Food was rationed and rations dwindled. It seemed that there was less and less to go around, even as the population stagnated and new supplies were brought in.

It seemed as though Lafayette just knew more than they did. And when they met Hercules, after making their mad break through the remnants of Manhattan, they trusted him on the arm of Lafayette’s faith in him.

“Okay, dude,” John says, annoyed, when it’s clear that Lafayette is done with divulging anything to him. Leaves him to read his book. Laf reads a lot – gets through one or two books a week, maybe two and a half if he’s had enough down time. It keeps his mind occupied.

John takes to the kitchen, takes to helping Hercules fill bottles with rain water. He and Alexander seem to have gotten past their spat, finally, and have quieted into new conversation. Alex still looks a little bristled. Could be residual from the storm.

“The first aid kit Lafayette found has water purification tablets in it,” Hercules tells him. “The rain water is fine to drink – should be, anyway. But we have them if we need ‘em.” John nods. Herc asks him to move the filled bottles into the garage. “They’ll stay cooler, there,” he says.

So, John takes them by the arm load into the garage. Stacks them on one of the sturdy, wire shelving units that they’d pushed out of the way to make room for the mattress. With each periodic trip out, Lafayette looks up from his book and watches John cross the room. When he makes his last trip, he keeps two bottles. One for himself, and one that he offers to Laf.

Hercules and Alexander are sharing the last of the rain water between themselves, and Herc had told him to make sure Lafayette drinks some of it.

“We’ve been days without any,” he tells Laf as he nudges his knee with his foot. “Drink up.”

He marks his place in the book with an old post-it. The adhesive strip has either rubbed off or collected dust and lost its stick. He puts the book down and thanks John.

“How long are we gonna stay here, do you think?” John asks him, eventually. Keeps his voice low enough so that the conversation won’t spark Alex and Herc’s disagreement again.

“Honestly?”

John nods.

“We shouldn’t for much longer.” Lafayette pauses before ultimately deciding to continue. “We need to start heading south before long.”

John perks up at that – south. Home. Briefly, his thoughts center on his family, on the younger siblings he’d been forced to leave behind with their father. “How far south?” he asks, that little bit of hope bleeding into his words.

Lafayette frowns at him. “Virginia.”

He deflates. “Oh,” he says. “Virginia. What’s in Virginia?”

Laf only tells him _later,_ with the same finality that reminds John that most of his questions will go unanswered. He stops asking for now, for the night.

The tired brain fog rolls back in before long. John manages through it long enough to eat; Alex nudges him with a sharp elbow to keep him up while they wait for their dinner to heat over a small fire Hercules had started in the house’s fireplace. They’re lucky to have the hearth – starting a fire would bring attention. The scent of cooking food could likely be worse.

Dinner is the last two cans of soup that they’d stockpiled from the town’s boarded up grocery store a few weeks ago. It’s a bit past the date printed on the label, and the contents taste like the tin they’d been packaged in, but it’s a warm meal. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Other than the food that they manage to scavenge, they have small collections of their own. John and Alexander had both brought MREs from New York when they’d left. It had taken a combination of skipping meals, sharing one between them, and stealing from a stock closet, but the effort has given them an emergency food supply, at the very least. Alex knows that Hercules keeps a generous supply of trail mixes – the kinds that come in thin, plastic sleeves, and were sold for a dollar or so at gas stations – at the bottom of his bag. Laf has a sweet tooth, takes candy when he finds it but usually shares.

“I’m gonna go lie down,” John says through a yawn after they’ve eaten. He’d been nodding off in the middle of conversation, in the middle of his own sentences, making now as good a time as ever to get a few hours of sleep in.

Hercules bids him a goodnight. It’s his turn to stay up and keep watch.

“So,” Alex starts. “What’s this Virginia business?” he gives Lafayette a pointed look, glances at Hercules to gauge his reaction. “I heard you talking to Laurens. I want to know what’s going on. Why are we leaving New York?”

“Later,” Lafayette tries to tell him like he’d told John.

“Bullshit,” Alex spits, unwilling to yield like John had. “I’m – _we_ are as much a part of this as you and Herc are. We deserve to know.”

Lafayette sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I never said that either of you don’t play a part.”

“So then why won’t you tell us?”

“Ham. Let it go.” Hercules speaks up with a parental air.

Rather than urging Alexander to concede, it only stokes his fire. “No! I want to know. I want to know what I’m getting into and it’s not _fair_.”

“Don’t yell,” Hercules hisses and clouts him on the arm. “Later. You’ll find out later. Don’t yell, don’t wake John or anything else.”

Alex stares him down and rubs the sore spot of his arm. It’ll bloom a bruise later, surely. He’ll heed the warning, for now. “Fine,” he grumbles. “Later better be the morning.” Before Herc can snap at him again, Alex stands. “ _I’m_ going to go lie down.”

“Fine. Don’t wake John to bitch at him.”

He stops in the doorway and has half a mind to turn around, start on it again. Alex swallows it down. He squeezes his fists together, tight, and unfolds them. Repeats the motion over until the tension eases out of his shoulders and out of his neck. He only walks into the darkness of the garage, doesn’t lie next to John, doesn’t even sit on the mattress. He stays in the faint light that comes in from the kitchen with the hope of eavesdropping on Laf and Herc’s conversation.

 _“No, I didn’t tell him,”_ he catches. _“Alexander could be right. They should_ _know.”_

_“And if it changes their minds?”_

_“I don’t think that it will.”_

_“Gilbert, if you’re wrong – ”_

_“Then I’m wrong. George sent you for me, did he not?”_

Lafayette’s tone takes on something unfamiliar. Not indignant, not proud. More commanding. It’s different from the resolution that he takes on when his mind has been made – more forceful. Alex can hear the resurfacing of the marquis that had been so applauded in the clear zone.  He has trouble, though, imagining Hercules yielding to Lafayette.

But he does. _“This is your gravestone, brother.”_

Their conversation ends there. Alex listens as Hercules moves around the kitchen and smothers the embers of the fire. The only remaining light comes from a flickering candle on the step down into the garage. Even with it, the trek across the garage to the mattress feels perilous. Alex shuffles, keeping his feet low to the ground as he steps, until he knocks the toe of his boot against the mattress.

John rouses, shifts sleepily.

Alex whispers his apology and sits on the edge of the mattress. John moves more into the middle, gives him a place to lie down.

“It’s not fair,” he says, half to John and half to no one. “I want to know what they’re keeping from us.”

“Go to sleep, Lex,” John’s voice is rough with sleep. He tugs on Alex’s sleeve and pulls him down by the arm. He lets John spoon him but doesn’t sleep.

Virginia exists in the edge of Appalachia and out to the Atlantic coast. Its border encapsulates half of D.C. and follows the banks of the Potomac and Chesapeake. Alex knows little of the territory past its natural borders and general geography. There had been reports that the Washington clear zone had fallen, or had been abandoned, but it was largely considered to be rumor with no evidence to back the claims.

He can’t imagine that they would be making effort into the former capital. Lafayette had been clear: Virginia. Not Washington, not Maryland. It bothers him as John falls more into sleep. It bothers him when Lafayette comes into the garage and takes up the space on John’s other side. It bothers him more than any of the blood-cooling noises the night offers. It bothers him until he’s too tired to think much, anymore.

 _Later_ does end up being the next morning.

John wakes him when the sun is full and risen and casting light. Hercules and Lafayette are already up – morning birds, the both of them. They rise with the sun and move quietly enough to have not woken Alexander. John’s sitting on the step into the garage, his boots on and laced and tied and his jeans cuffed over them. He’s picking under his nails with the tip of his knife.

“Laf wants to talk to us,” he says. “Before anything else, he said.”

Alex makes an undignified, sleepy _huh?_ noise and John laughs at him.

“Get your head on, Alex. Up and at ‘em.”

He sits up and rubs his eyes and wakes up for a second. Wakes up, gets up, gets dressed. Finds his boots. John walks in front of him into the kitchen, where Herc and Laf are sitting at the table. Their clothes from yesterday are stiff and dry and waiting to be folded and packed away.

“Sit down,” Lafayette gestures to the free seats. He waits for them to do so before he continues. “The long term plan is to go to Virginia.”

“Why? Why are we leaving New York? What’s even – ”

He raises one hand, palm out, to silence Alexander’s interruption.

“Friends of my family live there. The estate is outside of any clear zones, but it’s safe. It’s safer than staying in New York and safer than attempting to assimilate into another clear zone.”

“Wait,” John interrupts with less energy than Alexander had. “Why did you bring us, then?” he looks between Hercules and Lafayette. “If these are friends of your family… what promise did you need us for?”

Lafayette looks to Hercules in a glance that is more for assurance than permission. He waits for Herc’s nod before he answers. “They’re planning to rebuild. The estate includes a large plot of fertile land. It would be able to sustain itself with the products of the gardens – but not without anyone to work the land. Or to defend it.”

Alexander and John share an expression of confusion.

“No one has successfully rebuilt outside of clear zones,” Alexander says. “It’s a death wish. Unless your friend has a castle in the countryside of Virginia, I don’t see how we’d survive.”

“It isn’t fortified, but the estate is fenced. It faces the Potomac River.”

“It’s safe enough,” Hercules adds. “Safer than hiding in the suburbs.”

Lafayette nods. “We were planning on leaving by September. It will be easier to travel then, when the weather has cooled. We – ” he stops short, stands and heads into the garage. He comes back with a folded map and spreads it across the table to show John and Alex. New York is marked and from it, a number of paths have been mapped out in varying colors of ink. “We’re here,” he says, and points to a circled location. It’s off one of the paths. He trails his fingertip down a few miles and back to the path. “The plan is to take this down, through Pennsylvania and Maryland.”

“Wait, wait. Hold on.” Alexander pulls the map closer, peers at it. “This has us going through Washington.”

“It’s approximate. Crossing the Potomac is the biggest obstacle.”

“Is it true, then? Did the Washington clear zone fall?” Alexander looks up at Lafayette. When he doesn’t answer, he turns to Hercules.

“It was abandoned. The military left. Most people left, too.” Herc crosses his arms and talks like he doesn’t want to be having this conversation. “We’ll have to avoid D.C. for the most part.”

“We’ll have about a month to decide that,” Lafayette says. “If we go between ten and twenty miles per day,” he traces the path from their current location down to Virginia, “it should take us three or four weeks.”

“Best case scenario,” Hercules adds.

Lafayette steps back, allows John and Alexander to look over the map. The proposal is a feat in and of itself – with a path over three-hundred miles, through wilderness and developed areas alike, three or four weeks sounds like a low-end estimate. Alexander traces the path with more care than John does. He follows it through the county lines, around streets and interstate highways, stops when he comes to the largest barriers.

“How are we going to cross the Susquehanna? Baltimore? There are more dangers here than just Washington – do we even have a plan?”

“The Conowingo Dam crosses the Susquehanna. We’d have to go around Baltimore, as we would with Washington,” Hercules pulls the map to indicate what he’s talking about. “Moving around the cities will add a few days,” he says, pointing at a few paths that had been marked out in pencil. “But if we keep pace, it won’t make much of a difference.”

Alexander nods. Hercules speaks with an authority like he’s completed this trip hundreds of times; as if, because he will be there, nothing could possibly go wrong. And while the possibility of that is slim, it’s comforting nonetheless.

“So,” John says, after an extended quiet between them. “September?”

“September.”

Things, however, do not follow the plan they’d set out. As the end of August neared, they had begun to stock more food, eat less, plan for the long trip ahead. The first of September was the plan. Alexander has been keeping the days – he keeps a notebook fashioned into a pocket calendar, marks the months and the days and tries to count hours of daylight versus hours of night.

It’s midday when Hercules returns, earlier than expected, from another run out into town. He’s breathless. Sweat droplets slide down his forehead and his neck and have collected in stains around his collar and the underarms of his shirt.

“We need to leave,” he says without catching his breath.

John is lounging on the mattress. He’d spent the better part of the last hour whittling with his knife and then sharpening it. He sits up enough to watch Hercules force the garage door down. “What?”

“We need to _leave_ ,” Hercules repeats. “Where’s Lafayette?”

“Upstairs, I think,” John tells him as he stands. “What’s going on?”

Hercules doesn’t answer him. His footsteps fall heavy and fast up the house stairs and John can hear his voice from the garage, urgent and commanding. _“A horde’s coming. Twenty, maybe more. We need to leave.”_

John starts to pack their things. Alexander comes in from the house and watches him.

“We’re leaving?” he asks.

“Hercules saw a horde.”

“Shit.”

Alexander helps him pack the bags. John slides the new book that Lafayette had started the night before into his bag along with the thin boxes of bullets they keep for the gun. They still haven’t used it, and John hopes that they won’t have to. The bags are ready to go when Herc and Lafayette come in. John’s tying his field jacket around his waist while Alex stands waiting. They make haste in collecting their gear – the bags, the crowbar, the bat.

“We could have been a mile away by now,” Hercules says lowly when they finally move out of the garage.

“We won’t move any faster if you complain,” Lafayette snaps. He has the map out, folded to see the part of the marked path they’re closest to.

“We only have a few hours of daylight left,” Alex tells John. They’re walking a few steps behind Lafayette and Hercules, whose hushed argument has fallen into tense silence. The initial pace they’d set had been fast – get out of the streets, get into the woods, get away from the town. They’ve slowed, now, partly for comfort and partly out of need. The unpaved trail is too rough to move quickly.

“I know,” John says.

“Maybe five, if we’re lucky.”

The prospect of nightfall fosters an anxious pocket of dread in John. Since leaving New York, they’ve had only a single night without secure, walled-in shelter. The initial hike that they’d taken out of the city and had taken only an afternoon – Hercules had the good luck of being owed a favor that granted them a car up to Poughkeepsie, and then they’d walked out from there.

Now, without the Hudson at their backs as a natural protection, John feels dangerously vulnerable.

He shifts his knife to his other hand and rubs his sweaty palm on the thigh of his jeans, starts to say something about wishing they’d found a tent when he’s shushed harshly. His grip tightens on his knife.

Hercules and Lafayette had stopped in front of them. He and Alex come around either of their sides. The back of John’s neck prickles as he follows their gaze into a clearing ahead of them – in it, basked in the afternoon sun, is an infected. It’s crouched on its knees, leaning forward into the corpse of a deer, ripping at its hide and fur and flesh.

His heart, or maybe vomit, forces its way up into his throat.

“What do we do?” Alex whispers. The infected is young. From where they stand, there’s little sign of rot or decay eating away at its flesh. Blood, fresh and dried, coats its arms and hands. The hungered frenzy that it’s in keeps it from noticing them. “What do we _do_?”

Hercules shushes him. “We’ll go around.” He nudges John to get him to move. “ _Quiet_. Slow. Watch where you step.”

John twists the handle of his knife nervously as he walks. Careful, quiet, he avoids sticks and dried leaves and holds tightly to the hand that Hercules keeps on his shoulder. That hand forces him forward, maintains a steady pace. While John keeps his gaze downcast, watching his footing, Hercules watches the infected.

Two years into the outbreak, there’s still little known about the exact process by which the infection came about. In the training he had undergone in Charleston, John had learned basic theories as to what caused the infection, and how it progresses.

The young infected are closest to humans. They look almost alive, act almost alive, but are just that – _almost._ They seem caught in a limbo between life and death and do little but wander and hunt. As the disease progresses, though, they inch closer to death: decay starts to overtake them. As young, most of the senses they’d had as humans remain, though John believes that their scent and sight are heightened for them to better hunt.

He tries not to think about that as his breathing quickens and sweat continues to build a heavy, shiny layer on his skin.

Eventually, the infected lose their senses and their coordination. As death comes and rots their brains, they’re effectively killed when the agent that had reanimated them runs out of tissue to control and to feed off of. The end stages of the infection produce monsters that are more fervently hungry and more unable to chase, hunt, or kill.

Up until this point, John and Alexander have only seen these last stages of infection. The young generally aren’t found near clear zones; it’s the older and the rotten that make idle way towards the fortified centers. It’s the older and the rotten that are easily killed: shots to the head, or even the body, will incapacitate them.

It’s not until they’re a half mile away from the infected that John’s shoulders begin to loosen. Alexander lacks the same clear anxiety that John’s expression harbors – in comparison, he looks almost calm. Holds his crowbar in both hands. His nerves, though, keep him glancing back, over his shoulder, and back towards the clearing.

John notices that Lafayette had taken the gun out. While he’s normally a calming presence, the sight of Laf holding a gun ready only unsettles him further.

“You did good,” Hercules murmurs to him. He must have felt the wired tension of John’s muscles below his hand, and pats John on the shoulder as they start to quicken their pace again. Laf doesn’t put the gun away, and Alex still keeps half of his attention behind them; Hercules seems to be the only one of the four that isn’t readied with obvious and unwavering alertness.

He walks casually but with meaning, and holds the bat by its end, lets it swing as he leads them through the woods, winding around trees and avoiding low-lying thorn bushes and stinging nettle. Their path is south and westward, kept with the compass Alexander had brought from the clear zone. All of their gear is army. John’s field jacket is heavy and green and has his last name stitched into the breast. Stamped onto the left arm of his field jacket is _N.Y.C. C.Z._ , indicating where he was meant to serve. Though he’d received the jacket in Charleston, it bears no indication of the Carolinas.

They go on, follow Hercules, follow paths marked out by woodland creatures. They go on silently – since the encounter with the first infected, their guards are up to listen and watch for movement. During the daytime, the likelihood of encountering more than a few stray infected is low. The night gives them an edge – the element of surprise, the opportunity to sneak with less risk of being spotted and wasting energy on a kill that only gets away.

It’s hours, long and miserable, hot and tense hours, before Alexander breaks the silence. “The sun is setting,” he says.

As they’re heading westward, they all can see the sun as it’s been slowly making its way down the horizon, painting the sky reds and oranges but robbing them of light.

That heavy dread sits in John’s stomach again. He looks to Hercules, waits for his direction.

“There’s a ridge up ahead. The rocks might offer a decent enough shelter for the night.”

They make careful way down the ridge. It dips into a ravine that houses a shallow creek and its littered with grassy patches and dead leaves. Herc’s hunch proved true: clustered at the far end of the ravine is a tree, fallen and twisted around a pair of large rocks.

“We’ll sleep in shifts. A few hours each until the sun rises.” Hercules explains the plan as they reach the rocks, and sets his bag in the crevice. “Ham, you sleep first. You were up all night. Laurens? Do you want to sleep?”

He shakes his head. He doesn’t know if he can like this.

“Okay. Laf?”

“I’ll stay up with John.”

They eat by the light of the dying sun. They go through one of the MREs from Alexander’s bag and listen to Hercules tell some story. He’s obviously the most comfortable, out here, in the woods, almost entirely vulnerable to the elements and the infected. As he has taken the lead, dishing out directions and careful advice, the experience that he has from living for as long as he has outside of a clear zone shines.

Even Lafayette, who has his own experience outside of the clear zones, is on edge and uncertain. He’s used to a unit of soldiers around him in these situations – each of them as skilled as himself, each of them armed. That is undoubtedly more secure than John and Alexander.

While they are both trained, they’re infants to the real execution of their knowledge.

The thought is terrifying, but neither can say for certain that they wouldn’t freeze if a young, fast, hungry infected came at them. And as night falls and the last streams of sunlight fade, both feel more like liabilities than supporting members of the party.

“Full moon, tonight,” Lafayette whispers after Hercules and Alexander have retired to sleep within the safety of the pinned rocks. He and John sit in the grass and leaves in front of it, where they’d eaten earlier. The light of the moon is a blessing, offers a faint semblance of comfort.

“Yeah,” John says, mimicking the quietness as he stares upward.

Lafayette moves closer to him, so that their arms are touching, their backs to the makeshift shelter. “How are you holding up?”

His exhale comes out as a breathy laugh. “Is it that obvious?”

“You don’t need to get defensive. It’s alright to be afraid.”

“I just don’t understand how you and Herc are so calm.”

Laf laughs, this time, and John can see him shake his head in the faint light. “I think that Hercules is the only one of us who might not be afraid,” he says. He’s still smiling when he says it. The sentiment is comforting. “He may have made the journey from Virginia to New York on his own.”

“What?”

“I haven’t asked to confirm whether he did or not. The last part of it, he must have, though. When I met him, he was alone.”

John quiets as he tries to imagine that – walking these hundreds of miles alone, from dawn to dusk. He wonders about the nights spent, a month’s worth of nights, alone and in the dark, and understands how Hercules can sleep soundly when he turns his head towards him and the darkness of the rock shelter.

He turns his gaze back out into the ravine.

In the moon’s silvery light, they can make out only basic shapes – the shadow of trees and their leaning branches, and where the hills that enclose the ravine start. Mostly what they’re on guard for are noises. Shuffles and stumbles and breaking sticks, moans and gripes and howls. Depending on how close those sounds come, they’ll wake Alexander and Hercules.

John’s arms twitch as he thinks about it, as he remembers the snorts and sloppy noises the infected had made as it had bit through the muscle and tendons of the deer.

They have yet to hear anything, but night has only just fallen.

It isn’t long before those noises begin to echo from the woods above and make muffled echoes against the dirt and grass that surrounds them. His free hand, the one that isn’t clung white-knuckled around his knife’s handle, finds Lafayette’s and clings to it.

Lafayette offers no words of comfort as the sounds grow louder, but he does rub slow circles against the back of John’s hand. He’s grateful for it, grateful that his first night on guard is with Lafayette. He and Alexander would have been a wreck, would have woken Herc and Laf at the first sound, first creak, first imagined noise. And, for as warm as Hercules is, John isn’t sure that he’d be soft enough to let John hold his hand through the night.

They switch off with Hercules and Alexander after time passed with excruciating slowness. The others have faint, hushed conversation as they settle into their posts. They don’t hear much of it – the rocks do wonders for blocking out the noise of outside, and whispers don’t travel well through the air. The rocks do not, however, do wonders for any amount of comfort. Alex had laid out the blankets they have – one water resistant, the other thick and wool, in an attempt to fashion a pad for them to sleep on.

Lafayette sleeps close, always does, and lets their hand still touch.

Hercules wakes them when the sky has begun to lighten. He asks Lafayette to wake them up when the sun has fully risen. As they settle back into keeping watch, John twists his torso until his back cracks and relieves some of its sore tension. Lafayette stretches his arms over his head, rolls his shoulders, puts his legs out in front of him.

There are only a few minutes of silence, this time, before John roots through his bag and retrieves the candy bar that Lafayette had brought back for him. The chocolate has melted and hardened more than once, matte and a little chalky, but the candy tears easily when he breaks it in half. The caramel and nougat stretch.

He offers one half to Lafayette, who takes it and thanks him quietly.

It isn’t long before they’re on the move again, with their things packed and feet hitting ground. They pass a half-full bottle of mouthwash around to rinse the bad taste of sleep out of their mouths, spit it into the grass. Their day passes with idle conversation, lapses of silence, and no sign of infected. They’ve been lucky, Hercules says. He muses that maybe, there’s so few infected because of the horde that had come into the town. Maybe the monsters are territorial.

Alex shifts his weight between his feet. Squirms at the way that Hercules talks about the infected. He isn’t humanizing them, instead turning them into creatures of observation – like some kind of bastardized science project. Alex lets his grip loosen on his crowbar and checks the compass. Due west. He tells Hercules to turn a fraction.

“Laf, let me see the map,” Hercules says when they pause to rest. Their schedule is clear, now: a few hours walking, thirty minutes to rest, then they’ll repeat into the sunset. He unfolds the map and traces the lines he, or Lafayette, or whoever, had drawn onto it. The two of them are looking it over, each try to judge where along they should be at this point.

“If we’ve walked… we should be…” Only parts of what Lafayette says can be heard – he’s talking mostly to himself, as he compares the map to the time they’ve spent walking so far.

Hercules starts to ask, _Are you sure we’ve gone that far?_ but is interrupted by a growling scream.

The infected, where the fuck did it come from, is on them in seconds – its mouth is torn to reveal its teeth turned rusty with the remnants of blood, flesh hanging off of its exposed jawbone that might be its own or something else’s. It runs forward, staggering but quick, and has its hands on Alex, its nails scratching into the flesh of his arms. He was closest.

Alexander yells, and in his startle drops the crowbar, tries clumsily to fend it off with his hands and the metal hinge of his compass. Alex stumbles back, taken by the force of the infected, and loses his footing – a factor that quickly makes his fight a losing battle.

It’s Hercules that acts most effectively. John has his knife. Lafayette has the gun. Herc has the bat, has it in both hands with the map falling forgotten, and swings it bodily into the side of the infected as it tries to force Alex onto the ground.

The infected’s ribcage cracks under the blow. It turns its fury onto Hercules, but before it can make a counterattack he’s already reared back and swings the bat forward again, hard enough to kick it off of its balance. When the monster is on the ground, he brings his boot down onto its skull. Once, twice, until it gives a stomach-turning, satisfied crunch.

Herc doesn’t miss a beat. “Are you okay?” he asks, attention turned squarely onto Alex. He pulls Alex’s arms one at a time by the wrist, forces them to twist, looks him over for any marks. The scratches are deemed superficial – surface wounds that barely edge into the dermis. “Bites, deeper wounds, those are what you need to look out for.”

To be safe, though, he finds the crumpled first aid kit and offers Alexander one of the foil-wrapped alcohol pads for the scratches.

“Holy shit,” Alex says, finally, when he does speak. He still has the compass in one hand, the alcohol pad balled in the other. His gaze is trained on the corpse, on the gore that seeps from the wound that Herc had made with the heel of his boot. “Holy _shit._ ”

The corpse twitches – not with life, not with any real movement – and Alex stumbles away from it. He’d done just what was expected. When faced with an infected for the first time, he froze. He fumbled. He tried to defend himself with a compass and bare hands after losing his weapon.

Hercules catches him by the arm and he flinches out of his grip. “You’re okay,” he speaks in the gentle kind of tone that you put on for a scared child or spooked animal. “You’re okay, Ham,” he repeats, takes Alex by both arms. “Look at me. Don’t look at it. Look at me.”

He waits until he has Alex’s full attention. Hercules’s hands have him steady, have him where he is. He keeps their eye contact maintained as he says, again, “You are okay.”

Alexander breathes in shakily. Coughs on his exhale. He tries again, tries for deep and even breaths until he can manage them. Keeps trying until his breaths out don’t shake anymore.

“I’m okay,” he agrees. “I’m okay.”

When Hercules lets go of him, he shakes his hands out. He stoops to pick up his crowbar and holds it with purpose. He inches away from the corpse.

“Can we walk?” he asks.

They walk another hour or so, walk enough to put some distance between them and the corpse before stopping for their real break. They take up residence on an upturned tree that overlooks a pond. It’s thick with algae and silt and scum. The air smells heavy and humid and John can feel his hair frizzing in the bun he’s pulled it back into.

Alexander has been silent. Hercules nudges his arm and pushes a water bottle into his hand, tells him to drink.

Lafayette unfolds the map. The creases are starting to wear and go soft with use. He stares at it with intent. At this point, with how many times he’s looked it over, it should be pressed into the inner lining of his eyelids.

“I packed your book,” John tells him.

“My book?” he repeats, brow creased. His gaze drops from the map to his back.

“The one that you started at the house. When Hercules came back – I mean – I packed it. When I packed everything else.”

“Oh,” he says. He folds the map back up, rests it on his knee before he leans to go through his bag. The book’s pages are a little bent, its cover a little bruised, from the weight of the things that had been pushed on top of it in the hurry to pack. The worn post-it note remains securely where he’d left it, only half a chapter in. “Thank you.”

Lafayette looks over to him. He knows that John’s a sweet kid. That’s not to say that he can’t spit and swear and draw blood as good as any soldier boy – he can, he does. But he’s soft, past that. He has dimples when he smiles and a dusting of freckles across his face and down his neck, his shoulders. He has the syrupy twang of southern in his accent and he calls people _honey_ and _darlin’_ casually.

And Laf likes that. Likes him.

Alexander is different, less soft inside. He paces when enclosed and has shaky hands, reads impossibly fast and always manages to have something to say. Lafayette read his case file – more extensive than John’s, which mostly outlined discrepancies in his behavior and a transcript from a military school in South Carolina. Like Lafayette, Alexander had been in the city for school when the outbreak started.

He’d graduated early from high school and managed his way into university in New York through a series of Skype interviews and endless power of will.

Lafayette likes to think that his backstory is included because Alexander had rattled it off to the recruiting officer in the process of his draft into the mandatory service, but it’s more likely that it had come with his file from university.

As the service became what it is today, colleges and universities were urged to pass on the transcripts and student files of those who were old and able enough to serve. It’s more likely that the latter process was how Alexander found himself serving for the New York City Clear Zone unit.

After he had made the decision to recruit others into George’s rebuilding mission, Lafayette had requested from one of the supervisory staff for the files of promising infantry personnel. He’d leafed through those files and found Alexander and John.

There must have been some stroke of luck that gave him the way to convince them to desert and come with him.

Lafayette pushes through the pages of the book with his thumb and opens it to where he’d left off. He’s never been an especially avid reader, uses it now as a hobby to pass the time. As he starts the paragraph at the top of the page, he realizes that he’ll have to start over. That he doesn’t remember the setting, or the plot that was being developed in the first chapter. He pulls the scrap of paper and replaces it behind the front cover.

He flips back to the beginning of the chapter and curls the pages of the introduction and the paper cover around the spine, holds it there with his last three fingers and presses his thumb against the bulk of the book.

The time that they spend resting doesn’t give him much time to get into the book’s meat, though. They only rest long enough to catch their breath, regain some energy, and eat if hungry. Lafayette’s words ring with a more concentrated truth: staying still often is not an option. Especially in the open, where they sit exposed. Where, even as careful and vigilant as they can be, an infected can still sneak up on them.

Alexander only looks happy to move again, happy to put more space in between them and the clearing and the infected with the crushed skull. He walks half a step in front of Hercules and holds his crowbar with purpose.

“Do you think that horde’s coming this way?” John asks Lafayette. They’ve emerged from the woods and have taken to following a road that’s partly paved and has gravel that sinks down into the dip of the storm trench.

“I don’t know,” he answers, honest. “Hordes are unpredictable.”

It would make sense for the horde to continue to move. For the weeks that they’d stayed in the town, it had been a shell. They never saw other survivors. They’d heard the noises of emerging infected at night, but never came across one.

“All we can do is keep moving.” He says it with finality. He doesn’t want to have this conversation anymore. It’s an urging for John to stop asking questions.

“Yeah, keep moving.”

John quickens his pace, catches up with Hercules and Alexander. Leaves Lafayette at the rear. He takes up a half-step so he isn’t trailing so much but allows for the separation. Cocks the gun. Keeps half his attention trained over his shoulder, into the trees and the underbrush that they leave behind.

Hercules, who had been relatively silent since the incident in the woods, laments suddenly: “We should have brought the booze.” **  
**


	2. don't move nothin, statue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Outside of the hard-line boundaries of the clear zones, the world seems to have stopped. With nature and greenery reclaiming what it had once been taken out of, with dust and age wearing down everything else. Or, so it seems.

**Northern New Jersey  
September, 2 A.O.**

Little, it seems, will ever go to plan. The last days of August take them through the last of southern New York, but the dying breath of summer brings with it the same, heavy rainfall. Summer thunderstorms. It rains them out of traveling farther and they hole up in a new house. It’s small, quaint, in the middle of nowhere, and eerily untouched.

With the exception of heavy dust and moth-eaten holes in the fabric of the curtains and furniture, the house looks as though its residents could return at any moment. Dishes left in the sink have collected mold and hard water stains. The windows and door at the front of the house that have been boarded over are the only indication that anyone had occupied the place since the outbreak.

“There’s no way we’ll make it to Virginia by November,” Alex says to John. Hercules and Lafayette had trailed away to clear the upstairs, leaving them together in the kitchen. Alex is sitting at the table with his crowbar in front of him and his expression despondent. His frown and the way his eyebrows pinch in the middle are indicative of his _thinking face_ , but it makes John’s lips curl.

“Shut up.”

“No! What are we gonna do when winter hits, huh? What then? We never should have left New York – ”

“Shut _up,_ Alex. Winter in New York would have been worse.” Alex open his mouth to protest, but John cuts him off, only repeating: “It would have been worse.”

He isn’t wrong. In the clear zone, and even with the military generators, heat cost too much energy and too much risk. John’s first December in the city was punctuated with double layering socks and shirts in an attempt to keep warm while patrolling the zone’s blockades. Warm blooded by nature and accustomed to the mild southern winters, the winter patrols had been some of the worst of his service. He’d spent those months, all of December through March ( _March!_ ) shivering and fighting a cough and begging for spring.

The summer, for all its heat and humidity and relentless, biting insects, is a hell he’d take over another frigid winter any day.

“There’s a corpse upstairs.”

Lafayette’s voice comes from the stairs, brings Alex and John’s attention away from their conversation.

“What?” Alex stiffens and takes tight hold of his crowbar.

“It’s dead. I don’t know how long.” He pauses and passes the weight of their gun from hand to hand. “it looked young,” he adds as he comes fully down to join them in the cramped kitchen. “Either it didn’t turn before… or…”

“Someone killed it.” Hercules finishes his sentence from the head of the stairs.

The realization brings a new air over the house. Something had happened here – something that none of them are able to appreciate fully, but something that isn’t far from their minds. It rests like a looming shadow in their periphery. Part of military training involves what to do in the event of a bite. In the event of a turning.

John’s blood runs cold.

By virtue of having minimal experience with any infected, the breadth of his knowledge is limited to the documents and journals that were provided to him during his training in Charleston. During the boot-camp he undergone upon arrival in New York City, other recruits were keen to spread rumor about the older service people who’d been involved in bite situations. It had all been fanciful storytelling, then, but with the severity of potential placed in front of him, John can’t imagine the intrigued smile he’d worn while listening to those stories.

“How’d they do it?” Alex asks with an uncharacteristic, tentative tone.

Hercules descends the stairs and sets the aluminum bat on the table before he responds. His demeanor is typically either neutral or jovial or sharp, at times and when necessary. His air has taken on an unfamiliar seriousness to match graveness when he speaks: “A shot through the head,” and taps his temple.

Alex breathes out, hard.

“It’s the only way to definitively kill a – ”

“No, I know. I know. It’s just.” Alex gestures to fill the space, to complete the sentence for which he’s at a loss for words. “Shit,” he manages.

John echoes the sentiment and shifts uncomfortably.

“Do you think it’s still here?” he asks.

“I said, the corpse is up – ”

“Not that. The gun.”

Lafayette and Hercules share a sidelong glance.

From what they can speculate, there are two possibilities as to how the corpse upstairs came to be. On its body, there had been evidence of bites, which ultimately led to its turning. That much is obvious, and that much allowed the conclusion that there had been some kind of attack, then escape to the safety of the upstairs. However, in the case of a bite, there are no known records of anyone failing to turn.

A bite, as opposed to a scratch or other contact with an infected’s bodily fluids, is a death sentence.

The two possibilities that remain to be more decidedly concluded upon are the method by which the bitten victim was killed. Lafayette had made the assumption that someone else had killed the corpse, put it out of its misery, prevented it from turning after the sickness set in. John’s suggestion, however, paints a new picture: that the corpse had been killed by its own hand.

“I – I don’t know. We did not check,” Lafayette says when he’s recovered from the severity of John’s suggestion.

“I can check,” John says. He passes by them, feels their eyes on him as he takes the stairs up two at a time.

The upstairs is in a similar state to the rest of the house: it’s small, with dated wallpaper and dusty furniture. A window at the top of the stairs, one that used to overlook the roof and the front yard, is also boarded over. Three doors stand open, left ajar. John’s skin prickles.

The first is next to the window and leads to a cluttered bedroom. In it, there’s a bed stripped of its covers and a slew of clothing, upturned drawers, books pulled from the shelf. He doesn’t go inside. He follows the railing around, back to the big boarded window, and walks down the short hall to the two remaining doors. A bathroom, another bedroom.

In the second bedroom, the stench of death and rot fills the air. John’s stomach turns.

The corpse sits between the bed and the wall, its legs stretched out in front of it and both arms lifeless at its side. Lafayette was right – it looks young. The marks of decay that have begun to pull at its flesh aren’t of the same kind that mar the old, rotting infected. These marks are more soured flesh, bugs coming to feed, heat turning the dead flesh weak and soft.

It’s dead, and he knows that it’s dead – knows that if it wasn’t, it would have aroused by now.  The infected don’t have the capacity to play any kind of tricks to stalk their prey other than pursuing. Some are stealthy enough to maintain the element of surprise, going unnoticed in the dark and in their environment, but most make themselves obvious before they have much opportunity to get close.

Still, he draws his knife as he approaches. The wall at the side of the corpse is spattered with blood and gore that has dried brown and drawn flies to it.

John takes a deep, shaky breath, and readies himself to enter the room. 

The air is heavy and hot; with the windows boarded up, the heat stays captured. With the peak of the day having just passed into afternoon, the stuffiness has also reached its peak. He tries to remember to breathe, feels the sweat dried on his skin replace with new perspiration.

When he reaches the foot of the bed and the corpse still doesn’t shift, he feels comfortable enough to lower his knife, put it back in its holster. John drops to his knees, leans down to start to look for any trace of the gun that had been used to put the corpse down. Under the bed, he sees the glint of the metal shell casing.

“Did you find anything?”

“Jesus _fuck –_ ” John exclaims as he startles, rears back onto his knees. The motion doesn’t come without hitting his head on the bed’s frame, and he swears as he rubs the blooming sore spot. He glares towards the door.

Lafayette stands there, biting back a smile. His eyes read apologetic, but the rest of him is halfway into laughter.

“Jesus fucking Christ, haven’t you ever heard of knocking?”

“Why are you on the ground?”

“I was – I was checking. Under the bed.”

Lafayette says _uh huh,_ and walks fully into the room. He lacks all of the hesitance and wired tension that John had had upon initially entering the room, and passes by him to inspect the corpse more closely.

“The bullet is stuck in the wall,” he points to a small hole driven through the paint, through the drywall, but without a clear sight outside of the house. The bullet must have caught frame, or brick, or something, in its trajectory.

“There’s a casing under the bed, but I don’t see a gun anywhere.”

Lafayette leans, looks at the corpse’s hands. “I think that someone else put it down,” he decides.

The conclusion begs the question of where the other person, or people, had gone. From here, the closest clear zone is New York. Newark hadn’t been successfully cleared, and after a disastrously unsuccessful attempt by the New York military, the city hadn’t been touched. Lafayette remembers that mission, remembers the vast number of recruits (most of them new, most of them younger than himself, most of them without any of the experience he had accumulated in the year he’d then spent in the service), that had left and not come back.

“Do you know if Philadelphia was ever cleared?” John asks him.

He shakes his head. “I do not. Most of the people that were evacuated from New Jersey were taken to New York.”

That was, of course, when search and rescue missions were commonplace. As the number of infected rose, and cities were overtaken and then overrun, they became too dangerous to conduct. Lafayette had been in the units of only a few S&Rs, and had only edged out of the clear zone and into the parts of the city that had yet to be formally cleared.

Most of what was found were infected, corpses, looted storefronts and barricaded apartment doors.

“We should still search for other supplies,” he tells John. With the house cleared, he’d felt comfortable enough in leaving the gun downstairs as Alexander and Hercules worked to secure the remaining open doors and windows.

He and Hercules had only gone as far as to investigate each room, ensure that they weren’t occupied by infected or other survivors alike.

John nods. They start to root through drawers, through the bedroom’s closet. Most of it is useless. They replace old, ripped and dirtied clothes with what’s the least moth-eaten and Lafayette skims through the books discarded to the floor of the other bedroom.

“Did you finish the other book, yet?” John asks him.

“No, I’m only looking.”

They’d made a deal for Lafayette to pass on the books he’s finished to John. The request had come out of reasoning similar to why Laf had picked up reading in the first place: something to occupy the mind.

“You could probably take one or two of those with you.”

 He hums his agreement, but goes otherwise quiet until John leaves him to look through the books.

Downstairs, Hercules stands proud in the living room. John can spy him through the pass from the kitchen, and approaches to investigate.

“Pull out sofa,” he’s told.

When John joins them in the common space, Alex has already taken to the mattress, lying on it spread eagle and looking contented.

“Hey, Lex, do you still have your field manual?”

The question shatters whatever blissful trance Alexander had drifted himself into and his eyebrows pinch again.

“Yeah. I do. Why?”

“Can I see it?”

“Yeah. It’s in my bag. Why?”

John leaves his question unanswered, and makes his way back to the kitchen. Finds Alexander’s bag, finds the field manual at the bottom of it. With the outbreak and the subsequent degradation of society, the field books that had been given out to new recruits were flimsy, weak paper stapled together and produced with an archaic printing press.

Some of the words, therefore, are faint on the page from the wear of being in Alexander’s hands for nearly a year, now. After searching through the index, John finds what he’s looking for: the short chapter that outlines the information gathered about the infection and the infected. John finds what he’s looking for, and reads.

\---

**CHAPTER 5: UNKNOWN DISEASE BY UNKNOWN AGENT B-11415**

The victims of the symptoms of disease by unknown agent B-11415 (from here on referred to as “the infected”) are dangerous and are to be avoided. Do not approach an infected or suspected infected. If an infected notices an uninfected human, it will pursue until it is successfully evaded, incapacitated, or unless it is killed.

SECTION 5.1: Spread of Infection

From field observation and limited empirical research on the unknown agent B-11415, the accepted mode of infection is through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected. Primarily, this method of infection is through contact with infected blood or, more commonly, infected saliva.

The typical course of infection starts with contact and proceeds through the symptoms of the disease by unknown agent B-11415 until the reanimation process (colloquially referred to as turning) is complete.

SECTION 5.2: Contact

It should be stated that any form of contact with an infected holds a great potential danger, and the threat of death or infection. Therefore, contact should be limited and avoided at all costs. Should contact be made, the infected show a number of behavioral characteristics that resemble predatory instincts.

An infected (regardless of its age) will pursue its prey without tire. Should the infected catch an uninfected human, it will first grab onto the body with the potential to leave scratch wounds. The infected’s instinct is to bite the uninfected human (as noted by a rooting reflex when anything is brought near to the creature’s mouth).

These bites are the primary contact that will lead to the progression of disease by unknown agent B-11415. Less commonly, severe scratch wounds or other forms of bodily fluid contact will lead to the same progression of symptoms.

SECTION 5.3: Symptoms and Course of Infection

As it stands, there is no accepted course of action to prevent or slow the progression of infection. No antibiotics, antivirals, or other forms of medication have shown any sign of slowing or stopping the course of infection.

From the contact (bite, scratch, or other form of bodily fluid contact), the progression of disease will last between twelve hours to three days. From field observation and other empirical data, there are no accepted conclusions as to what factors attribute to the timeline of disease progression.

The symptoms may vary, but include:  
\- inflammation and irritation around and leading away from the wound with pain at the wound site  
\- persistent fever that worsens with time  
\- agitation that worsens  
\- altered mental status  
\- marked exhaustion  
\- nausea and vomiting   
\- broken blood vessels in and around the eyes and mouth and bleeding gums  
\- slowed respiratory and heart rates  
\- sensitivity to light and sound  
\- unresponsiveness

SECTION 5.4: Reanimation (Turning) Process

The reanimation or turning process occurs after the twelve-hour to three-day period of disease progression. At this point, the bitten victim will become completely unresponsive to all stimuli, including: light, sound, and pain. The bitten victim will lose signs of life and vitals, such as the respiratory and heart rates.

The bitten is the most dangerous during this window of reanimation. At any moment, the reanimation process can begin and the bitten will become a young infected. It is unknown how the agent B-11415 reanimates the bitten, but the process is completed within 4 – 12 hours following the bitten falls unresponsive.

During this period of unresponsiveness is the ideal time to kill a bitten victim. This time prevents any sense of killing a comrade or civilian and prevents the bitten victim from reanimating.

SECTION 5.5: The Infected

If a bitten victim is not killed during the aforementioned period of unresponsiveness, the victim will undergo the process of reanimation completely and become an infected.

The young infected are those most recently reanimated or turned. These infected are closest to their previous human form, and maintain the host’s senses and abilities. However, young infected will run without tire or care to prevent injury. They are violently hungry and pursue uninfected humans until they are either: evaded (via natural barrier, etc.), incapacitated, or killed. The young infected are able to hunt and stalk. Outside of clear zones, one must be consistently on guard for any young infected that may be around.

Within weeks to months, the infected will begin to decay. As an infected ages and rots, it loses the senses and ability of the host and is unable to pursue uninfected humans as they once were. However, older infected remain desperately hungry and should not be treated without the same care as one would treat a young infected.

SECTION 5.5: Killing the Infected

Infected are not alive, but are not dead. The brain is kept alive by the unknown agent B-11415 and is used to control the body for as long as it is able. The process by which this occurs is unknown.

The infected are effectively dead when:   
\- the brain has rotted  
\- the body has rotted beyond ability to move or function  
\- the brain or brainstem have been severed or destroyed

The only way to ensure that an infected has been killed is to destroy or sufficiently damage the brain and/or brainstem of the infected.

\---

Alexander stands in the doorway between the living room and kitchen, watches John as he sits at the table and scours the field manual.

“You’ve read that thing front to back hundreds of times,” he says as he makes his approach. “Why are you reading it again?” Ever nosy, Alex leans over the table to see which passage he’s reading. It answers no questions. “John?”

“I just.” He sighs, heavy, and closes the leaflet. “It’s not like I forgot, but, I just – I wanted to remember. What that person went through.” John nods towards the staircase as he references the upstairs corpse. “You know?”

Alex frowns. “Don’t humanize it, John. Don’t humanize _them._ ”

“I’m not – ”

“Yes, you are. You can’t start thinking about what they _went through_ , because then, and when it matters, you’re gonna freeze.” Alex’s expression darkens with his words and he crosses one arm over his chest, grips his bicep. “Hesitating when it matters is how people get killed.”

Part of him has yet to recover from their close call. It’s been days since they trekked the forest near Poughkeepsie, but Alex still can’t shake the feeling of dead hands on him. The shallow scratches that they had left on his arms have healed; they didn’t even scab over. The skin pulled together and the marks left only a faint discoloration in their leave.

“I know, Alex,” John says.

“So stop this.” Alexander pulls the book back, curls it one hand. “Whatever you’re thinking, you gotta stop.”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

John nods. An iota of tension remains, even when Alex makes him say it, say that he promises, out loud. He stands there for a moment, clutching the paper in his hand, staring John down. His gaze isn’t met, but it’s acknowledged with restless hands and in the way that John’s lips twist and curl down.

The air loosens only as Alex relaxes his shoulders and crosses the room to return the book to his bag.

“Hey, Alex?” John turns to him, waits for his attention. “Don’t lecture me.”

“I wasn’t lecturing.”

He scoffs, almost rolls his eyes, but refrains if only to maintain his dignity as having grown out of the state of annoyed teenager. “Could’ve fooled me,” he says, muttering despite himself.

They’re interrupted by Hercules, who looks between them with a quirked brow. “Everything alright in here?” he asks as he makes his way for what he came.

The one virtue of the rain is that it allowed them to replenish their clean water supply without using the purification tablets in the first aid kit. Hercules retrieves one of the bottles from his bag and drinks from it.

When neither Alex nor John answer his question, he clears his throat. “You both know that we don’t have time to be fightin’, right?”

They both protest at the same time, jumping to say that they _know_ , and that they’re _not_ , but Herc seems unconvinced as he screws the cap back onto the bottle.

He gestures with one hand, dismissing them both as he says: “I don’t care what it’s about, I don’t care who started it. It’s finished. I’m finishing it.”

“What’s going on?” Lafayette finally comes back from the upstairs.

Concern drapes itself over his expression, only amplified when Alex and John say, in unison and with equal cadence of annoyance, _“Nothing.”_

He looks to Hercules.

“Nothing,” Herc agrees. “Don’t worry.”

Though it does little to ease him, he says, “Okay,” with careful reservation.

John and Alex’s conversation still hangs in the air between them – and Alex’s hard stare is enough for Lafayette’s gaze to linger on him. He storms out with all the poise of the dignified, annoyed teenager that he is.

The living room is enclosed. Its only door leads back into the kitchen and its windows are boarded over, leaving the room dark and hot. John paces around the room, his steps coming between the lines of light that stream through the cracks crevicing the boards. He swears under his breath and hears Herc’s voice carry, hears him tell Lafayette not to go after him.

Eventually, though, he does anyway. John has settled on the ground, his back pressed into a corner and he’s taken to picking the dirt out from underneath his fingernails with the tip of his knife.

“I understand if you’re annoyed.”

“Laf, don’t.”

“I _understand_ ,” he only emphasizes, talks over John when he tries to silence the conversation. “You’re tired. We all are tired.”

“Don’t infantilize me,” John spits. He frowns at his nails like he’s directing his anger there, rather than at Lafayette.

“I’m not. I’m only saying that disagreement is inevitable given the circumstances. _But,_ ” he tips his head to try and look John in the eye. John hunches his shoulders and turns his gaze towards the wall. Lafayette sighs at him, continues: “But, we don’t have the time or the energy to spend on disagreements. We still have weeks ahead of us.” He nudges John’s shoulder with the heel of his palm. “I need to know that I can count on you.”

“You can,” he says. “I haven’t shown you anything that says that you can’t,” he turns his glare up at him. “I’m not a child. Stop treating me like one. I have just as much experience as Alexander and – and – ” his breath comes out in an annoyed noise as he struggles for words. “And whatever.”

“I never said that you were less experienced than Alexander.”

“Then why aren’t you having this conversation with _him_ ,” John protests.

“How do you know that I haven’t?”

The retort effectively silences him, and the anger in his eyes fizzles.

“I hope that you know, I hope that both of you know, that I chose you specifically from an equally qualified group. If I didn’t have the same faith in you as I do in him, you would not be here, John.”

Though his words go unanswered, Lafayette watches as John begins to unfold. He allows his legs to stretch out in front of him and tips his head back to touch the wall. The breaths he takes turn slow and even and his gaze turns soft.

Lafayette rubs the heel of his palm into John’s bicep. “We’re good?” he asks.

“Yeah. Yeah, we’re good,” he confirms. Sighs and stretches his arms up over his head, strains until his back pops and gives with the release of pressure. “I wanna go outside,” he says.

Lafayette goes with him, takes the gun, tells Hercules that John needed some air when faced with those same, questioning eyes, and that same, quirked eyebrow.

The rain had calmed into a quiet drizzle, drops only spitting on his skin from the clouds and from the heavy hanging leaves. John’s bare shouldered and kicks his way through the thorny underbrush towards the back of the house. Vegetation overgrown, the lawn that was once manicured has been overrun with weeds and prickers and low-lying plants. Laf trails a few steps back, lets him have his air and his space and watches as he circles a tree.

“Cherries,” John says and pulls a branch down. With his free hand he collects as many of the ripest that he can hold and lets the branch snap back into place, doesn’t flinch when the motion spits more water on him. “Here,” he opens his palms to Lafayette.

Fruit, he misses fruit, and good vegetables, and hearty dinners that don’t have the sharp tinny taste cutting through them. He gives half of the cherries to Lafayette and holds one, bites into it, teeth around the pit. As he walks and drops cherry pits and stems behind him, John says that they should collect a bunch, keep them.

Lafayette lets him talk – go on about the cherries, fall into the idea of collecting the fruits of the season. He gets stuck on honeysuckle, remembers the curling vines that wound around trees and the bramble stems of blackberry bushes. He investigates a few vines, touches the budding flowers, remembers coming out on cooling, humid nights with his siblings to chase fireflies and suck the nectar out of the yellow-white bulbs of honeysuckle blossoms.

He’s still poking around the leaves when Lafayette catches him by the elbow. His gaze follows the direction that he nods to, watches motion in the thicker, taller, bushes and grass towards the end of the property line.

“We should go in,” Lafayette tells him.

John takes his knife out, safe.

They go in and when Lafayette goes upstairs, he doesn’t follow. He sits at the table with Hercules and traces the dents of wear in the woodgrain. What was left in the kitchen is spread out across the rest of the table, most of it uninteresting.

There’s an opened bottle of wine, half-empty, soured to vinegar. An unopened jar of peanut butter. Hercules is poking through some of it, looking for salvagables, when John speaks up.

“Lafayette told me you’d been living outside of the clear zones for a while,” he says.

“Uh huh?” Hercules gives him only a brief glance, says it only to see where John’s going with it.

“Why? I mean – how long? Did you ever live in a clear zone?”

“I was in D.C. when it fell,” he says after an extended silence. “Both times,” he clarifies. “Outbreak, then when the C.Z. was abandoned. It’s been a year, give or take.”

John says _oh,_ and stops asking questions. He lets them fester, all dozens of them, and will voice them only to Alexander when they’ve gotten over themselves.

For the rest of that day, they hadn’t talked to one another. They’d shared stiff eye contact, hesitance pulling John’s mouth open, halfway into words, before Alex would turn away from him and back to his hands, back to whatever he was doing.

“No time for fights,” Hercules reminds the next day, voice low, and from behind him. John’s been standing in the kitchen and looking over all of his worldly possessions, trying to best pack them away into his bag. Herc’s hand touches the small of his back when he passes him and John watches him as he moves the basket of cherries into the living room.

Alex’s footsteps fall quiet and fast down the stairs, he’s halfway into saying something to Hercules and stops short when he finds John there instead. “Oh,” he says.

“Hi,” John says, remembering Hercules’s words and the gentle touch of his hand.

Alexander pauses, comes up to see what John has spread out on the table. “Are we in a fight?”

John shrugs. Looks at him. “I don’t know, are we?”

“We shouldn’t be,” he sighs. “Being in fights is stupid.”

Because they are both bull headed, opinionated and outspoken, their falling into disagreements is common but fights are different. Fights mean that their anger runs deeper, a rift rather than a shallow dip between them, something that’s harder to get over than a change of conversation. The last, and only, time they had been in a fight was immediately after Lafayette had disclosed his plans to desert and made his offer to them.

John, impressionable John, had come on board quickly. He’d been pulled like moth to flame that a man such as Lafayette would pay them any heed, and to offer the opportunity to see something more with it. Of course, that naïve idolization of him has faded, faded into seeing him as a person and friend rather than an image or a figure whispered about. But the night after he’d brought it to their attention, John had started packing, and Alexander had hissed “ _What the_ fuck _do you think you’re doing?”_ at him.

They’d gone back and forth for days over it. John had given him the ultimatum, eventually, frowning and saying, _“I don’t want to, but I’ll go without you,”_ and it hadn’t taken much more for Alexander to start to consider. It hadn’t taken much more for Alexander to approach Lafayette in the mess hall, John at his flank, requesting more information.

He’d agreed, eventually.

That leaves them here, standing side to side.

 “We don’t have to be in a fight,” John tells him. He busies his hands with stacking his remaining MREs in the base of his bag, tucks the book that Lafayette passed onto him at the side.

They quiet, again, until Alex nudges his sharp elbow into John’s side.

“I didn’t mean to lecture you,” he says. “I just. I just don’t want you to get caught up in – no. No, that’s not what I mean.”

In the pause that Alexander takes to find the words to describe what he’s meaning, John speaks up: “I get it. Really. I think I know what you mean.”

Silence falls over them again. Alex’s demeanor feels as though he’s still not satisfied with their interaction, with the way that John just lets things settle into dust, but Herc’s words ring true. They don’t have time for fights, arguments, or altercations, but they also don’t have time to waste in making up.

“I still can’t believe – ” Alex folds his hands behind his head. “I still can’t believe that we did this.” When John still offers no reply, he continues: “I don’t even know if this is better, you know? Than the zone, I mean.”

He takes John’s hum as a response, and keeps talking when John bends to continue repacking his things.

“Sure, the zones are safer but – do you think we’re better off? Here, or whenever we get to Virginia?”

“I don’t know, Lex,” he sighs. “I don’t know.” He shrugs with both hands held palm-out, and gestures vaguely. “I trust Lafayette. And. And that’s enough for me.”

Alex just says, “Huh,” and it unnerves John.

It makes his hair prickle and his hands curl when Alexander looks at him. He narrows his eyes back, then breaks away to continue gathering his things. His hand tightens on a sweater as he folds it with purpose. Puts and bundles all his nerves into it.

“Do you need anything else, Alex?” he asks eventually, exasperation bleeding in.

“Your blind faith scares me.”

“Do you not trust him?”

“No, but I have a spine enough to _question_ – ”

“Cool. Can you do me a favor?” John waits, and watches as Alexander perks slightly with the question. “Fuck off.” He watches as Alexander deflates, light leaving his smart eyes and arms coming up to cross over his chest.

“You got to be kidding me.” Hercules stands in the pass between the kitchen and living room, arms crossed, sharpness tugging his features down. “You’re bickering like a pair of high schoolers.”

Their protest overlaps each other, a pair of indistinguishable sentences that quiet only when Hercules holds one hand up.

“Get along, or stop talking to each other. It’s _finished_.” Herc’s finality is harsher than Lafayette’s. It stills them both into a more permanent silence, one that lasts even as his hard footsteps take up the stairs.

John digs his nails into his palm.

“Sorry,” Alex says, eventually, insincerely. He sighs, and tries again: “Really. I’m sorry, Laurens.”

“You need to get off my back, Alexander,” he says. “I know you don’t mean anything by it, but I need you to trust that I know what I’m doing.”

There’s a pause, during which Alex stares at him and examines his face, before he accepts it.

They stand in tense silence, Alex watching as John packs his bag and pulls the zipper over the bulge his stack of clothes left at the top of his bag. He doesn’t wait for the tension to fade before he takes his leave, muttering something about going to lie down upstairs. He’s kept away from the room with the corpse since they found it, since he’d investigated the cause of its death. Despite it, he feels safer upstairs – like the time it would take for someone, or something, to traverse the staircase would give him enough time to defend himself.

The bed is more comfortable than a creaky pullout, for the few hours that he manages, eyes closed, curled on one side and facing the wall, back to the door and window.

It isn’t until later, much later, that he and Alex reconcile properly. They sit side to side on the back step and watch the sun sink below the horizon of trees. Sharing the bounty of cherries and spitting their pits into the grass.

“I trust you,” Alex starts, watching as John ties the cherry stems into a chain. “I trust Lafayette and I trust Hercules.”

“I know, honey.”

“I’m just. I’m bad at showing it, I guess,” he adds, sheepish as he dedicates his attention to tracing the slight ridge of the fruit with the pad of his finger. “It’s so different out here,” he says, eventually, after he’s stripped the fruit from the pit with his front teeth. Alex winds back, throws the pit as far as he can. It disappears into nothing after just a few, airborne seconds.

“Do you think we can rebuild?” Alexander hates the silence. He fills it and forces John to fill it, too.

John folds the cherry stem chain over his leg and leans back with both elbows on the step behind him. He thinks about his sisters, and the crowns and necklaces they’d make out of daisies and other wildflowers. He squints into the thick of underbrush and prickers and looks for any blooms.

“I hope so,” he tells Alex. “Otherwise, what are we gonna do?”

Alex hums. They talk idly about Virginia and John voices his questions about Herc’s past and they speculate on what’s happened to the other clear zones. Though the conversation stays light, it leaves them both with an uneasy tightness in their throats and stomachs. The kinds of nerves and anticipation that twist and bubble uncomfortably in one’s gut

John bites his nails and drops the stems into the grass next to him. “We should go inside,” he says into the last rays of light.

They stay the night but not much longer. With the last signs of the summer and its rain falling to clear skies, they’re back on the trail again. Bright and early and with the first breath of a new day, they take to the streets. Alex had suggested they go through town and there had been no reason not to do so.

“This place is a ghost town,” Alexander says into the empty air. 

Like the house they had claimed for the few days, the town’s main street is equally desolate and untouched. The sidewalks have cracked and fallen to the push of new roots, sprouting grass and stretching trees. They weave around potholes and over deep cracks in the asphalt and look into the storefront windows.

“Laurens,” Hercules says as he nudges John’s arm with the heel of his palm, “get your knife.” He holds that palm against him, glancing over his shoulder to watch as John fumbles with the buckle of the holster on his hip. Herc waits for him to get it out before: “Watch my six.”

The color drains from John’s face as he keeps at Hercules’s heel, knife drawn in one hand and his other curled into a tight fist. His knuckles go white and he sucks hard on his tongue. He shuffles close, following Hercules through the broken-down door of what was a locally owned convenience store. In it, shelves are overturned and freezer doors left open. The smell of soured milk hangs in the air.

“I said watch my six, not hug my six,” Herc stops John with that same hand on his shoulder.

“I’m not – what are we doing?” John stops, lets him walk a few steps ahead now. “Did you see something?”

He peers, squinting into the shadowed store, looking for sign of movement. Nothing, nothing; he can’t see anything abnormal, can’t hear anything but his own, quick breathing, can’t smell anything but the turned milk. A corpse would smell worse and an infected would have made itself known by now.

John watches Hercules, all tense shoulders and holding the bat ready, both hands holding its grip. As he rounds the corner, all tense shoulders and heavy footfalls, a shape darts out from under one of the overturned shelving units and runs at John.

His shout of surprise isn’t dignified, and his first instinct is to kick the low-moving object – which hits back against the metal shelf with a sharp squeak.

“You killed it!” Alexander exclaims from behind him.

Laf looks like he was halfway to shooting – gun in both hands, finger curled around its trigger – and relaxes only when he sees that the thing that had startled John is nothing more than an oversized rat.

The shout hadn’t stopped either of them from coming into the store, despite their agreement to turn and run and worry later. 

“A rat. John, really.” Lafayette’s tone is flat as he shakes the tension out of one hand and allows for his shoulders to even from their hunch.

“It – It came out of nowhere,” he says, not without a glare.

“If anything was in here,” Hercules says as he rounds the mess to stand by John, “it woulda come out by now.” He grins, forcing back a laugh as he claps John on the shoulder.

He grumbles, “Y’all are making fun of me, but my reflexes ain’t bad.”

Alexander snorts as he takes to going through the clutter on the floor. Most of it is empty wrappers, molded over food, things gone bad. He even nudges the rat John had kicked with the toe of his boot. He says, “You killed it,” again, with a sense of more wonder as it turns over with the press of his boot.

“Shut up, Lex,” John tells him before turning his back and following Lafayette where he wanders.

“They’re making fun of me,” he says, matter-of-fact, as he leans on the glass countertop and watches Laf leaf through the rows of magazines. Most are torn and have lost their glossy sheen, going instead matte and flat with their color softened by the elements.

“You killed it,” Lafayette echoes Alexander, deadpan putting on accusatory. It lasts for only a moment before his expression breaks into a smile and he laughs at John and his pout.

“I trusted you.”

“Did you know that Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton are dating?” Lafayette asks him as he finds the most legible tabloid copy he can find. He holds it up and gestures to the cover: big, bold letters spelling out the scandal of November. “I can’t believe this was news,” he says, smile fading as he flips through the aged pages.

“That’s weird,” John says. His lip curls and he scrunches his nose before leaving Laf to the magazines, instead rounding the counter to root through its cabinets. He thinks about the big stacks of newspapers his father would save – sorted away into filing cabinets and bookshelves, stacks of them dating back decades. John wonders idly, if his father had managed any copies of the papers that had outlined the events foreshadowing the mass of the outbreak.

He stops wondering. He pokes around, through heavy stacks of cabinet folders – each labeled and dated and meticulously organized. With care, he pulls them out of the under-counter storage before continuing to rifle. Mostly, he finds stale cigarettes, and moves the cartons out, places them on the folders, and scoots to expand his search. The fruits of his labor are two sleeves of unexpired cold medicine.

“Fever reducers,” Laf says when he offers them. “Keep them.”

Both cardboard sleeves go in the bag. Along with them, a few protein bars that don’t feel like rocks under the press of his fingers, and a sealed bag of hard sugar candy. There’s nothing else. Laf thumbs through the rest of the magazine until he comes to water damage that renders it illegible. Sighing, he drops it to the counter.

He turns to watch as Hercules and Alexander struggle with getting one of the shelving units upright.

“If there’s something up here, Herc, I swear,” Alex leaves his threat empty and through teeth grit with the effort.

The whole thing rumbles when they get it upright. It tilts and sways one way and then the other, threatening to fall. Lafayette side-steps to avoid it, should it actually come his way. The packets of food left under the unit are gnawed through, emptied by the likes of the rat John had kicked.

“All that for a bag of rat-infested potato chips,” Alex sighs, dejected, and kicks the bag in question.

There’s little else in the store. None of them dare to pry open any of the refrigerated units lining the back wall. With the acrid smell of spoiled milk and mold already leaking into the air, they fear for what it might smell like if unhindered by the doors. With it sufficiently plundered, stripped of anything of use, Hercules decides that they should go.

“It’s so quiet,” Alexander says to the air, to no one in particular, when they leave the store to take through the main street again. “Like, unnervingly quiet,” he continues when he goes unanswered. “Even Poughkeepsie had more action than this.”

“Barely,” Lafayette says. Humors him.

Their time in Poughkeepsie had been, well, boring by most standards. With little to do past scavenging for food and water and supplies, time had droned on. It had droned on without incident. Time here, and time on the road, drones on at least with near constant movement, always walking, always something, and the constant prickle of threat at the nape of the neck. It prickles into hair that stands on end and Lafayette looks over his shoulder, just in case.

“I like it quiet,” John mutters.

“It’s a ghost town!” Alex walks ahead of them, arms stretched out. The comfort he takes in the stillness of the air allows him to exclaim, gesturing widely with both hands. His voice echoes into the narrow passes between the brick storefronts that line the street. Old builds, old buildings, they look timeless. Even with broken, dusty picture windows, they look timeless.

“Shut up, Ham,” Herc chides.

Little moves around them. The torn, worn fabric of awnings and window coverings turn in the slight breeze and hug the air. Trash spins like tumble weeds down the dilapidated sidewalk and fall motionless in the dip between the curb and the road.

They pass an alleyway with a pair of overturned dumpsters, all chipped paint and going red with rust, lined with coils of barbed wire.

“There must have been survivors here,” Lafayette states as they pause as a group to take in the sight.

For desperate times, desperate measures had to be taken. In the clear zone, the fortifications were tall, metal structures bolted into the brick and stone walls of buildings and cut across streets. The walls were erected to keep people enclosed as much as they were to keep the infected out. Taking the climb down one of the walls, the metal still slick with the rain of the night before, had been the perilous start to Alexander and John’s mad dash out to uncleared Manhattan.

Hercules begins to say something – probably with intent to keep moving, to keep pace, but he’s cut off by a loud, flinching noise. His meaning falls short to: _“Gunfire,”_ as he shoves Lafayette, _“haul ass.”_

In the fading echo of the rifle’s discharge, they scramble. Alex and John take at Lafayette’s heel, urged forward by Hercules, who barks orders. His voice carries somewhere between loud, urgent and commanding, and low enough to not be heard by their assailant. Instinct takes over in the form of their heavy boots hitting ground, making heavy, unison footfalls with one plan: to get away from the aim of fire.

_“Cut into that store – no – that one, that one.”_

In the building, their footsteps come emptier, softened by carpet eaten away by unkempt. One of Lafayette’s hands curls into Alexander’s sleeve, yanking him to duck behind the table that he kicks over.

Alex, all breathless and incredulous, shouts: “What the fuck, what the _fuck._ ” He’s shushed immediately, and quiets into a streamline of panicked: “Okay, okay, what the fuck, how does anyone survive out here for that long, what the _fuck_.”

John rubs his palm into Alexander’s arm in an effort to calm him into silence. He and Hercules had been a half-step behind them and drop to hide by their side. Periodically, Hercules raises his head to peak over the rim of the table’s edge.

“I think it was a warning shot,” he decides eventually.

“A warning shot! Of course, yeah, a warning shot to take someone’s head off,” Alexander barks a sharp laugh and tips his head back against the underside of the table.

It brings two conversations to the mix:

John, in his ear, quietly trying to quell the brewing frenzy, and Hercules making note: “Yeah. A warning shot. No one’s coming out.” He watches for a few more, tense moments, watching the street carefully. “We should go,” urgent whisper.

None of them move. Alex is part frozen in his panic, and John won’t move until Lafayette does.

“ _Gilbert._ Go,” Hercules urges, gesturing sharply with one hand. “Out the back, whatever.”

He has never taken that harshness in his tone with Lafayette. The newness of it is enough to spur Lafayette into moving, standing and pulling the boys with him, making out through the remnants of what must have been a small restaurant. The room they cut through is entirely chrome, basking in seamless, tarnished silver.

“No door. Hercules, there’s no door,” Lafayette turns back, turns to look out into the main area.

Hercules answers him, _“Fuck,”_ and rips the bandana off of his head. The fabric has gone dark with collected sweat and he wraps it tightly around his knuckles, still swearing as he straightens to stand fully.

“We shouldn’t go back out there,” he says when he’s calmed enough to speak past cusses. “Warning shot,” he repeats. “If we go back out there. If we go back out there – ”

“The next shot won’t be a warning,” Alexander finishes his sentence. His panic has evolved into a dangerous calm, the kind of levelness he takes on when emotion (fear, anger) has completely overrun his veins and tendons and brain. He and John have come up behind Lafayette, taking up the space of the push-door out from the commercial-style kitchen.

“Yeah.”

Tension lays on thick, hangs heavy in the air and mixes in with the heat and the muggy humidity. Sweat beads at the back of Lafayette’s neck and he grips his hand tight around the gun’s handle. The pistol doesn’t have the same range as a rifle; they’d never get close enough to safely return fire, even if they chose to make the attempt. He keeps his eyes trained on Hercules, awaiting his direction with bated breath. His lungs and chest and throat feel too tight to breathe and he needs to count his exhales, focus on his inhales, to try and maintain some level of even-headedness.

“Hercules. Hercules, what do we do?” his voice betrays him – that anxiety, wound tight, makes his voice go weak.

Fear – let alone uncontrolled fear, this kind of sharp and obvious fear – is unfamiliar on Lafayette. It only stirs queasy unsettlement in John’s stomach and he twists the handle of his knife in his hands.

The feeling worsens when Hercules, defeated, only says: “I don’t know.”

“Can’t we – there has to – ” John starts to pace like a trapped animal. He gestures vaguely with his hand, the knife as an extension of his arm, and he follows the footprint of the dining area in hopes of finding an exit. Nothing, nothing. The only window is boarded over, giving no sightlines for the possibility of infected looming behind their temporary sanctuary.

“ – there has to be something,” he finishes, deflating as he looks into the hopeless room. John turns back, back to Hercules, back to Lafayette. Alexander is still hidden, standing in the pass through to the kitchen.

“There’s a window,” he offers, weak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ENORMOUS apologies for how long this took ; i sincerely hope that the next chapter doesn't take nearly as long to get out. life happens, so it seems. but - i'm off work for the next few days due to being under the weather and hopefully i'll be well enough to get a good chunk of the next chapter written and edited. 
> 
> i'm trying to blend interpersonal conflict with external conflict with world building and.. i'm happy with it so far ! 
> 
> (chapter title credit goes to clipping.)


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